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LibreOffice Coming To iOS, Android & The Web

10-14-2011, 12:00 PM

Phoronix: LibreOffice Coming To iOS, Android & The Web

The LibreOffice media team has passed along some new information about what was revealed at this week's LibreOffice conference. At the Paris conference, experimental versions of LibreOffice for iOS, Android, and for web-browsers were revealed...

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I hope Android implements an accelerated browser soon. That, along with relatively high latencies, are the two biggest annoyances with android at the moment.
Please Google, use the RT patch set.
As for libreoffice, I had no idea they used gtk anywhere in the code base. I thought it all swing, or whatever the java gui toolkit is called. Regardless, broadway needs some serious optimization before this becomes truly useful. Perhaps when the SPICE is wan ready is can be used. IIRC, SPICE will passthrough font info so that stays nice and crisp, and that is obviously hugely important for an office suite.

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GTK is one of the possible front-ends for their internal toolkit (you can also use Qt as a front-end), but as long as you are using the GTK front-end, you can use it to draw on anything it supports -- and one of the things it supports is HTML5.

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A mobile version available only one year or more from now? Won't that be too late? There are already a few options when it comes to office suites for mobile devices and more are sure to come. Let's see how that turns out.

I hope Android implements an accelerated browser soon. That, along with relatively high latencies, are the two biggest annoyances with android at the moment.

I think Android 3.2.1 is already using the accelerated browser. At least everything feels much smoother in the browser now, resembling the kind of experience you'd get on iOS. But you're right, having a UI that stutters and chokes a lot does make Android look like an inferior product. How can they release so many versions over the years and not address this (seemingly) simple user expericence flaw?

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A mobile version available only one year or more from now? Won't that be too late? There are already a few options when it comes to office suites for mobile devices and more are sure to come. Let's see how that turns out.

No, there is absolutely NOTHING for document editing or spreadsheets on Android, and I could care less about apple. Only total trash like documents2go and similar uselessness. Some have *minor* editing capabilities, most are just viewers, some are ONLINE viewers (i.e. google docs, completely useless), but nothing that you can actually use to create, open, and manipulate REAL documents. Certainly nothing that you can use to manipulate REAL document FORMATS -- all the cruft that exists will only deal with MSDOC formats, nothing that will manipulate ODT. What's the point of locking yourself into a proprietary document format controlled by your arch nemesis? In fact, I haven't seen an msdoc format document in *several years*, and certainly would NOT convert all my documents to that crap just to satisfy the input requirements for a substandard pseudo-wordprocessor.

There have been a few projects come and go with the intention of building a proper word processor, but without exception, they have been by "some kid" who had no idea about (a) the complexity of such an application, (b) that they themselves didn't have the necessary competence to even BEGIN. With a proper word processor for Android, the "average user's" shackles to the desktop (i.e. MS) will break, because that is basically the ONE LAST thing that exists for Desktop that has never had a proper option for mobile. There will, of course, continue to be specialized applications that depend on MS desktops, but the "average home user" will be happy to have a proper word processor, web browser, and email on their Android tablet or phone.

Oh, and since tablets and phones have the ability to output to different displays and input from USB (i.e. keyboard/mouse), the phone/tablet will LITERALLY be a full-desktop-replacement with this one final missing piece.

It will also propel Libreoffice (aka Openoffice) to the top in office software since it is extremely unlikely that MS will ever build for Android. That would be like admitting defeat.

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I think Android 3.2.1 is already using the accelerated browser. At least everything feels much smoother in the browser now, resembling the kind of experience you'd get on iOS. But you're right, having a UI that stutters and chokes a lot does make Android look like an inferior product. How can they release so many versions over the years and not address this (seemingly) simple user expericence flaw?

Web browser acceleration is up to the browser itself. Try Firefox, I believe that's accelerated. Its also better in practically every regard to the integrated crap browser.

As far as a smooth experience... maybe time for a new phone? Everything is perfectly smooth for me.